(Downtown Los Angeles Skyline)
By Laurence Darmiento | The Los Angeles Times
It’s hard to grasp the enormity of “The One,” but an aerial photograph of the largest modern home in the United States provides perspective.
Viewed from a drone, the white marble structure once marketed for $500 million looks every bit the fortress towering over the scattered dwellings of a village.
Of course, those diminutive quarters are themselves mansions that climb the hills of Bel-Air, houses that are multiple times smaller than the 105,000-square-foot behemoth hovering above them.
That such a giga-mansion could be built says much about the asymmetrical excesses of our age — in which the struggle for housing plays out in the valleys as spec homes that only a minute fraction of the world can afford rise above them.
It’s also a testament to the will of an obsessive developer driven to build the most extravagant mansion he could imagine — which he now finds slipping through his fingers as he battles a hard-nosed money lender who’s in for more than $100 million on the project.
